British hacker Ashley Mitchell thought it would be a hoot to steal $12 million in online cash from Zynga, the creators of Facebook games like FarmVille and CityVille. And it would have been! If he hadn't been caught.

Mitchell's story reads like a textbook bungled burglary. He hacks into a Zynga server, running popular online card game Zynga Poker, and steals 400 billion of the game's betting chips, which have an official worth of around $12 million.

Live Poker by Zynga, also known as Live Poker By The Guys Who Made Farmville, is hoping to be the…
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Only once stolen, they're not worth anywhere near that much. Outside the bounds of the game, on the black market, they're "only" worth $300,000. And Mitchell could only offload a third of them before he was caught.

He's admitted his crimes to a British court and, once convicted, faces "a substantial jail term".